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NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- In the U.S. government's biggest crackdown to date on a hacktivist group calling itself "Anonymous," four leaders and one other activist were arrested Tuesday and charged with a computer hacking conspiracy. The U.S. Department of Justice also revealed Tuesday that it had snared the prime leader of an Anonymous offshoot group called LulzSec, which conducted a high-profile, two-month hacking rampage last summer against corporate and government targets. -snip- What particularly set the movement on edge was the conviction and apparent turning of the LulzSec leader Hector Xavier Monsegur, known by his hacker alias Sabu.

AIPAC is now our enemy. We're calling for an occupation of AIPAC and the destruction of their websites. Make them pay for their crimes. We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We must certainly not forget. Expect us or perish."

In January the group decided to hit the websites of the US Department of Justice and various media companies in response to the takedown of file storage site Megaupload, providing a guide on Pastebin for those who wished to take part in the attacks. Symantec says that an attacker appears to have copied that guide and inserted their own version of the Slowloris software containing a secret Trojan that downloaded a copy of Zeus, a piece of malware often used to take control of an infected computer.

Breaking: at 9a.m. CT today, the hacker collective Anonymous announced it had taken down the AIPAC website. The pro-Israel lobby group's conference began today. President Obama will speak at the conference this morning, where he's already under fire for being seen to be weak on confronting Iran and on supporting Israel's hardline leader. Republicans are hoping to make electoral hay at AIPAC and look to split as much as possible of the Jewish vote away from the president. Significantly, Obama's warm-up act this morning was Liz Cheney. Guardian correspondent Chris McGreal tweets: Applause for Liz Cheney at Aipac when she...

-excerpt- The international police agency said in a statement Tuesday that the arrests in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Spain were carried out by national law enforcement officers working under the support of Interpol's Latin American Working Group of Experts on Information Technology Crime.

<p>WikiLeaks said Monday that it had begun to expose e-mail correspondence from the global geopolitical analysis firm known as Stratfor, detailing the company’s work for clients.</p> <p>WikiLeaks did not disclose how it had obtained the e-mails, but Stratfor acknowledged in December that its data servers had been breached by a group of hackers known as Anonymous. The loose-knit group publicly supports WikiLeaks.</p>

If there is one war that Greece could not afford to join, that is with the global computer hacking collective known as Anonymous. Yet as of minutes ago, that is precisley what happened, after Anonymous, as part of what it now calls Operation Greece, took down the Greek Ministry of Justice (http://www.ministryofjustice.gr/). While the pretext for the hacking appears to have been an arrest of the wrong people, is seems to have angered Anonymous to the point where they have left an extended message of demands on the Greek website, warning that unless the IMF withdraws from the country and...

I have a new paper appearing at IEEE S&P with Hristo Paskov, Neil Gong, John Bethencourt, Emil Stefanov, Richard Shin and Dawn Song on Internet-scale authorship identification based on stylometry, i.e., analysis of writing style. Stylometric identification exploits the fact that we all have a ‘fingerprint’ based on our stylistic choices and idiosyncrasies with the written word. To quote from my previous post speculating on the possibility of Internet-scale authorship identification: Consider two words that are nearly interchangeable, say ‘since’ and ‘because’. Different people use the two words in a differing proportion. By comparing the relative frequency of the two...

The director of the National Security Agency warned that the hacking group Anonymous could have the ability within the next year or two to bring about a limited power outage in the US through a cyber attack. Gen. Keith Alexander, the agency's director, provided his assessment in meetings at the White House and in other private sessions, according to people familiar with the gatherings.

SNIPPET: "Meanwhile, if anyone has any sites to add to this list, or any other insights regarding HuT online, I'm right here."

SNIPPET: "While these various elements of the jihadist network are distinct, the Internet brings them together, especially at the grassroots level. Videos, websites and online magazines indoctrinate aspiring militants in the jihadist ideology and provide a forum for like-minded individuals and groups."

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been under fire from world leaders to step down this week. He’s also under fire from hacktivist group Anonymous, who leaked hundreds of his office’s emails on Monday. While Anonymous is infamous for its hacking know-how, it doesn’t take a genius computer programmer to guess one of the passwords commonly used by Assad’s office accounts: 12345. The string of consecutive numbers is the second-weakest password according to a 2011 study.

OAKLAND -- The hacker group Anonymous inserted itself into the feud between the Occupy Oakland movement and the city by releasing the personal information of top city officials this morning. The international cyber-clique gained notoriety last year when it launched a similar move against BART after the agency shut off cell phone service in its tunnels to thwart protesters. It released a statement on its website admonishing the city for its treatment of Occupy demonstrators. This time, they posted a page displaying personal contact information for Mayor Jean Quan and her husband, City Administrator Deanna Santana, police Chief Howard Jordan,...

LONDON – Trading jokes and swapping leads, investigators from the FBI and Scotland Yard spent the conference call strategizing about how to bring down the hacking collective known as Anonymous, responsible for a string of embarrassing attacks across the Internet. Unfortunately for the cyber sleuths, the hackers were in on the call, too – and now so is the rest of the world.

The “anti-fascist” wing of the “Anonymous” hacker group has broken into a website run by the white supremacist American Third Position (A3P), and released a document dump consisting of private forum messages, emails, organizational notes, and other personal information. The documents show numerous connections between Republican candidate Ron Paul and these racist Neanderthals; they’re heavily involved in campaigning for Paul, and according to the messages, have held regular meetings with Ron Paul himself:

Anonymous, the group of activist hackers, claimed to have crashed the Justice Department website on Thursday in retaliation for prosecutors shutting down the popular file-sharing site Megaupload.com. "The government takes down Megaupload? 15 minutes later Anonymous takes down government & record label sites," the group wrote on its Twitter account. A Justice Department spokesman did not confirm whether the agency had suffered a cyber attack, but justice.gov was not loading as of Thursday afternoon.

Kelly Clarkson and Michelle Branch may have unofficially endorsed Ron Paul, but Nicole Scherzinger, No Doubt and Rise Against? Not exactly supporters, as recent tweets from the musical artists may lead people to believe. Early Wednesday morning, very similarly-phrased Ron Paul endorsements popped up on the official Twitter accounts of Nicole Scherzinger, No Doubt and Rise Against. The tweets, which were deleted by each artist after several hours, have been confirmed to Billboard.com as hacks. It's worth noting that all three artists are currently signed to Interscope Records, a curious coincidence that may explain why they're linked in this specific...

Noticing the First Signs (Excerpt): Revolutions don’t just happen instantly over night, they develop over long periods of struggle. So keep your eyes and ears open for signs of a coming uprising, such as: Civil unrest prior to riots in the major cities. Politicians and media blatantly lying about the most obvious developments. Censorship of social networks such as Twitter or Facebook. This may not be entirely obvious at first but when the sites are blocked completely the warnings are clear (with excuses like child pornography). Censorship of old media such as newspapers and television (non-regime critical press). Arrests of...

Hacker collective Anonymous has just dumped 200 GB of names, email addresses and passwords for around 860,000 Stratfor users. Anonymous also exposed credit card numbers for 75,000 paying customers of Stratfor. Stratfor, a security think tank, provides reports on international security and related threats to government and military personnel as well as to the private sector. It is unknown whether Anonymous gained access to other, more sensitive information during the Stratfor hacks, which occurred on December 24. “The time for talk is over,” wrote Anonymous last night on Pastebin. “It’s time to dump the full 75,000 names, addresses, CCs and...

Anonymous Confirms August Hacking Of Military Supply SiteDecember 30, 2011 Members of the hacking collective Anonymous announced this week that they had breached the database of a military supply Web site earlier this month, reportedly obtaining 14,000 passwords and the credit card information of nearly 8,000 customers in the process. According to a Thursday article by Chloe Albanesius of PCMag, Anonymous targeted the website, SpecialForces.com, “their customer base is comprised primarily of military and law enforcement affiliated individuals, who have for too long enjoyed purchasing tactical combat equipment from their slick and ‘professional’ looking website.” Albanesius notes that the attack...